People use between-household communication primarily for social reasons: to keep in touch with and coordinate joint activities with a limited number of friends and family. Households are currently linked to one another primarily by telephones and by telephone-extension devices such as answering machines. Other technologies (e.g., the postal service, email, fax), are used on a more limited basis.
Such ongoing contact with significant others is a fundamental human need, and one that current household technologies meet in a less than optimal way. First, there is no technological support for a household to have continuous background awareness of distant households that it cares about, in the way that it has some ongoing awareness of physically neighboring households (e.g., by noticing a car is in the driveway, a lighted window, or muffled sounds of a conversation). Such awareness would allow conversations to take place opportunistically that currently do not take place, and might allow certain currently unwanted conversations to be avoided if such background awareness was sufficient for feeling “in touch.”
In addition, the telephone (currently the primary technological support for remote conversations) embodies a model for initiating and disengaging from social interaction that is rarely found in everyday life. Disregarding for the moment non-basic elements such as busy signals, answering machines, caller-ID, etc., the telephone provides three states: disconnected, ringing, and connected. The model of social interaction created is akin to that created by a windowless room with a closed, locked, and soundproof door. Callers are forced to initiate interaction by knocking (ringing), without any advance indication of the callee's situation within. Similarly, the callee is forced to decide whether to unlock and open the door with very limited information (even more limited in the telephone case, as ringing cannot be varied as can knocking). Once unlocked and thrown open, the conversational partners confront each other at close range, with little ability to adjust social distance to a mutually desired level. Conversations end, with little subtlety or room for re-engagement, by shutting the door and returning to an entirely disengaged state. People have adapted to such an unnatural model remarkably well, but a technology that offers a more flexible and subtle model of gradual, foreshadowed, and mutually-negotiated approach would be highly desirable.
There is presently a lack of devices which simply relay information concerning the presence of individuals at remote locations for social purposes. Functionally, the closest analog to a social presence device is the real-world situation of living next door to a neighboring house. In such a situation, one can notice various things about the neighbor's house (and patterns in the neighbors activity) that would allow one to initiate a conversation at an opportune time, if one so wished.
Baby monitors, both audio and now video, are one of the few, if not the only, awareness technologies on the market. In the CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) research world, Montage from Sun Microsystems implements a kind of “video glancing” that allows messages to be left if “glancing” reveals the recipient to be unavailable.
The term “media space” refers to the linking of a number physically separated spaces to create a larger “virtual space” for communication between various individuals. Researchers have noticed that it is very difficult to document an objective gain from use of media spaces in workplaces, but also that the users nevertheless were unanimous about the usefulness of these systems. A stated advantage is the social awareness that is provided and which may be conducive to deciding when direct communication would be appropriate. The awareness issue is sometimes referred to as the support for background communication, see for instance William Buxton's GI (Graphical Interface) '95-paper about foreground and background.
A problem with media space is that it is typically a high-bandwidth medium, which creates serious privacy issues. The “Porthole System” from Rank Xerox EuroParc partially addresses this problem by sacrificing image quality in order to obtain a continued sense of presence without providing real-time imagery. However, their choice was to lower the frame rate while keeping the image resolution high. Avatar design and research provides abstraction and synthesization to reduce the privacy issue.
Technologies that allow a communicating party to refuse a connection attempt without having to give an explicit refusal of access include: caller ID, call screening through answering machines; mirror windows, door spies. However, these technologies provide this feature unilaterally, namely to the callee only. Other technologies that allow a communicating party to “prepare” for the communication: media space systems that convey room images.
What the related art does not suggest, however, are classes of technologies of varying bandwidths that permit remote social interactions at different threshold levels for a variety of purposes.